More and more people are turning to the Internet for shopping, services and information about news and weather. While general usage has been increasing steadily, non-recurring events, such as breaking news, severe weather, etc. create tremendous spikes in bandwidth and pageviews as large numbers of users consult a relatively few number of news and weather sites for information at once. Many content providers have responded to periods of high usage by increasing their server and bandwidth capacities through costly hardware upgrades. However, this is disadvantageous, as these content providers are purchasing and maintaining more capacity than necessary for regular usage, which wastes resources and capital investment.
Other content providers that cannot afford hardware upgrades have another, perhaps more troublesome problem, in that they cannot meet the demands placed upon their Web sites during period of high usage. For these content providers, the increases in pageviews are too much for their server systems, which results in users being served an error page or experience extremely slow response times during significant events. Users receiving these problems become frustrated and alienated and turn (often permanently) to other Web sites for their information.
Thus, there is a need for a solution to the above-mentioned problem of handling period of high usage, without the need for costly hardware upgrades. For example, there is a need for a system that can serve double, or more, of normal levels of traffic without significantly impacting the user experience and bandwidth costs in a negative way. The present invention provides such a solution.